One day in New Jersey, years ago, I was standing on a train platform waiting to catch a train into New York City. Seeing beautiful and well-dressed young women waiting at the platform, on their way to work, I thought: How many of these women are committing themselves to a life of singlehearted devotion to Mammon, the god of the world, without reaping any of the benefits that would arise from a life dedicated to the true God? They are celibate, after a fashion, but they are not virgins; they make sacrifices day after day, but reap no salvation from them, and bring no immortal souls into the world. They might have sex, but no children; thus, they lose the chief glory and merit of the married woman. Once they have a child, they then frequently hand over the burden of work to someone else, losing the greatest opportunity and privilege of all, that of nurturing and educating their own offspring. We know that there are cases where daycare cannot be avoided and is chosen as a last resort; and yet, could one truly say it is unavoidable in the majority of cases?
So many modern women are a set of absolute contradictions: their lives are consecrated, but to a false god who takes away the blessings of virginal faith; they are lying down with their husbands, but choose barrenness; when they bear children they do not nurse and educate them. In a satire upon their own existence, they are unvirginal celibates, unfruitful wives, unfaithful mothers, and all this by choice. Remember the threatened virgins Saint Augustine talks about, or the barren women we meet in Sacred Scripture, or the glowing examples of dedicated motherhood in the world? These virgins chose rather to die than to give up their bodies for profane use; these barren women cried out day and night to God for children. These mothers not only pour out milk to nurse their children, they pour out their very lives to bring them up rightly.
The other thought that occurred to me, with an ironic twist: in many of his sonnets Shakespeare urges the recipient to beget children in order to pass on beauty, and not waste it on oneself. The sonnets assume that sexual intercourse is naturally and quite happily linked with the conception of children; that marriage, all things being normal, leads to family (to think otherwise just would not have made any sense to a person living in a traditional culture); that a spouse will not only bear but rear children with complete dedication. What would Shakespeare have said to these women on the train platform? Get married? But they are, many of them, yet they have no children. Have children? But some of them have— one or two, and they think this is “more than enough.” The whole structure of social relations, the most elementary moral responsibilities, indeed the most basic human realities, have disappeared; Shakespeare would have almost no way of entering the minds of these people.
Let me emphasize that I am talking only about what might be called voluntary barrenness, the de facto sterility chosen by those who either do not want children or do not wish to shoulder the burden of commitment. Obviously those who deeply desire to have children and cannot must bear this cross with the help of God’s grace, for their infertility is certainly neither chosen nor blameworthy. Childlessness is in truth the deepest sorrow and burden for those who have a worthy conception of marriage and human life. Whereas the perversity of the modern attitude consists precisely in viewing children as a losing proposition, as a throwing away of one’s life.
When the prophet Isaiah uses the metaphor of mother for God’s tender love, it relies upon the fact that the bond between mother and child is known and felt to be the strongest, the most sacred, the most intimate of all bonds. It is one of the purest models of love available to us, and thus God can make use of it and expect to be immediately understood. No mother forgets her child; how then could God? When Scripture says, “Even if a mother should forget her child, I will not forget you, says the Lord,” it is making a reductio ad absurdum: no mother worthy of the name forgets her child, and, since this is true, how much more will God remember us, since He is our maker and sustains our very being? Today, the very basis for making this comparison, the natural and beautiful bond of mother and child, is openly mocked and repudiated.
The bond of mother and child has been mocked before. Thomas Hobbes, a thoroughly materialist philosopher (if that is not a contradiction in terms), had this to say about mothers and infants in his fanciful state of nature:
For in the condition of meer Nature, . . . the right of Dominion over the Child dependeth on her will, and is consequently hers. Again, seeing the Infant is first in the power of the Mother, so as she may either nourish, or expose it, if she nourish it, it oweth its life to the Mother; and is therefore obliged to obey her, rather than any other, and by consequence the Dominion over it is hers. (Leviathan, Penguin ed., p. 254)
One cannot fail to see the parallel to modern pro-abortion arguments. Yet Hobbes maintains this position only for the hypothetical state of nature or state of war; in civil society, a practice like exposure of infants would never be allowed by the sovereign power. Hobbes’s more subtle follower, John Locke, argues in the Second Treatise that parents have no power or right over life and death of their children, that parents are accountable for their children, and that procreation is the “chief end” of marriage. Even Locke, “Mr. Property,” who defends an almost absolute right over one’s property and one’s body, can see that marriage is ordered to children.
There are always hardships involved in having children—more in the past, perhaps, even than now, in spite of efforts by glossy magazines to convince people that they cannot possible afford the price-tag of a human person—which makes the fundamental change in attitude or habit of thinking all the more noteworthy, indeed ominous. It is the ebbtide of Lebenslust, love for life.
What is the root of this fundamental change in attitude? I think it is a deep and complex root of many branches, but surely, a most important contributor is materialism, the philosophical driving force behind the abortion mentality. As applied to human beings, materialism amounts to a denial of the human soul, that form or actuality of the body that causes it to be alive and to serve as the instrument of the soul’s many powers, especially the most divine element in us, our intellect. For the materialist, there is nothing in a man other than physical springs and cogs. To commit suicide is to relegate oneself to the scrapheap, to commit euthanasia is to release a worn-out machine from its poor functioning condition. To kill a developing child is to remove some unwanted parts from a female machine.
(How, one might object to a materialist, can a being which is organically growing towards some perfection be understood as a machine, when no machine in the world ever does anything of the sort? A child is alive and full of desire to grow, to mature. Abortion violently interferes with the most fundamental human process, the growth of a child from a fertilized cell to a baby, and onwards to adulthood.)This materialism that reduces the individual to his matter is akin to the collectivism that reduces the differentiated body politic to aggregate masses ready for manipulation. In his brilliant Gifford Lectures, Gabriel Marcel observes:
What is immediately obvious is that whenever circumstances prevailing here and now lead to men being not only regarded as masses but actually treated as such—treated, that is, as aggregates, whose elements are transferable according to the demands of temporal vicissitudes—it becomes more and more difficult to keep in mind the inalienable characteristics of uniqueness and dignity which have hitherto been considered as attributes of the human soul created in the image of God. To say that these characteristics are becoming more and more lost to view is not enough; they are being, if one may so put it, actively denied, they are being trodden upon. Man may end by imagining that he can prove by his very behavior that he is not such a being as the theologians have defined.
If we look at the question carefully we shall see, also, that we have here a real vicious circle. The less men are thought of as beings [with innate worth], . . . the stronger will be the temptation to use them as machines which are capable of a given output; this output being the only justification for their existence, they will end by having no other reality. There lies a road which runs straight to the forced labour camp and the cremation oven. (Mystery of Being, vol. 2, p. 165)
In the same lectures, Marcel talks about the effort to create (or at least envision) a soulless world and modern man’s tendency towards “de-creation”. People have bought into the illusion that man is all exteriority and no interiority. In a similar way, Charles De Koninck spoke of the “lifeless world of biology.” The suppositions and framework of the modern science of biology, which are thoroughly materialistic, paved the way for human reductionism.
At this point, we are very far away from the image in Isaiah the Prophet, where the yearning of the mother for her child serves as a vivid image for the tender mercies of God towards lost and wayward Israel. Somewhere in the human heart, no matter how calloused and cynical, there is an ember of that yearning, a spark of that love. We need to breathe on those embers and throw tinder on those sparks as much as we can, by witnessing constantly to the great gift of human life, the beauty of motherly and fatherly love, and the hard-won but deeply satisfying joy of living outside of oneself for the sake of another. Remaining silent on the evil of abortion, the evil of contraception, and the evil of divorce would make us complicit in the reduction of man to machine, the replacement of sacrificial love with egotistical calculation, and the demonic effort to uncreate the world.
Peter Kwasniewski, Ph.D. is a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College (B.A. in Liberal Arts) and The Catholic University of America (M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy). He has been teaching philosophy, theology, and music at the university level since 1998. He has held posts with the International Theological Institute in Austria, the Austrian Program of Ave Maria University, the Phoenix Institute Europe Foundation, and the Austrian Program of the Franciscan University of Steubenville. Currently, he is a Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Wyoming Catholic College. He is also a published and performed composer, especially of sacred music.
- Love for Life and Contempt for Children
- Blasphemy Against Mercy
- Media Spin, Human Nature, and Speaking the Truth
- Four Surreal Scenes
- Birth Control and the Love of Life
